Category: Uncategorized

Dr Austin again. “Sperry takes over where William James left off. Neurosciences have rejected reductionism and mechanistic determinism on the one hand, and dualisms on the other…. higher level interactions [of the] brain are presumed to be reducible [only in principle] in terms of fundamental physics. How does it help us to know about quarks, molecules and the brain’s high water content ? We have personal quirks which go beyond our quarks …. Interactions of a [complex] system, always much more than the sum of their parts …. our brain develops new emergent properties.” Whahaay, ‘ere we go. See Brian Josephson below.

Who was it said something like “To know about a man’s make up in terms of his chemistry is only of interest if you intend to make fertiliser out of his body” ? Blogged somewhere ealier.

“Thinking with meat” [after Terry Bisson]. Getting there.

The plot thickens further …

I’m now reading Dr Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”. Not surprisngly for a real US medic he spends a fair amount of time apologising for his mystic tendencies and acknowledging christian religious sensibilities, before he dares launch us into his Zen treatise. (I suspect 2/3 of this 800 page tome is down to such political correctness.)

Plenty of homage to Herrigel and Suzuki in laying down the history of modern Zen foundations. Not a single reference to Pirsig – oh well. But a positive citation for a certain Father Andrew Greeley. A Catholic PhD Sociologist of some note apparently, and the very same Andrew M Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center who slammed Pirsig in 1975 for his “bigotry”.

(I just sent Pirsig a question about that reaction a couple of days ago – weird.)

Picked-up on TiddleyWiki via Ton. A really neat peer-to-peer wiki, to collaborate on building, editing and linking information fragments, known as Tiddlers, without any server side components. So simple it has to be a winner.

Review at Frontwheeldrive of Protocol by Alexander Galloway. Via a cross-hit on my earlier P2P / Rhizome view of web organisation.

At Web2.0 Brewster Kahle pointed out that most books are out of print most of the time and only a tiny proportion are available on bookshop shelves. Scanning the 26 million volumes in the US Library of Congress, the world’s biggest library, would cost only $260m (�146m). The scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space and cost about $60,000 (�33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf. [via BBC News]

Brown and Duguid’s “Social Life of Information” (2000) I now notice was preceeded by a Xerox PARC paper of theirs called “Social Life of Documents” (1995), which I now also notice includes good old fashioned books. [Ref Univ Western Ontario Philosophy reading list]. In fact it seems to be a plea to remember that books / documents differ from electronic data in more than just physical forms of delivery mechanism. (Must read the paper further.)

Just read Lavery’s Evil Genius now in its entirety.

Looks unfinished (is that deliberate ?); ends with scene on 10th November 2004 (385th anniversary of Descartes’ birth). “I have set up a headquarters …” or is he (or she) just waiting for us all to join him (or her) there ? (Are the forward and back links either side of Nov 6th deliberately broken / ambiguous ? Stepping backwards through the pages follows a different thread to the forward links – Aha, have I missed a trick there ?)

Undisguised collection of quotations and original thoughts railing against Dualism. Pretty exhaustive collection of philosophical sources including plenty of post-modernists and AI / Sci-Fi writers. Many of my own favourites in there, Barfield obviously.

I won’t spoil the climax. Majoring on poetry as the purest form of knowledge, and god knows, but plenty of poets have arrived at mind-altering drugs before on this quest.

In fact Evil Genius is a blog – a series of diary pages, notebook pages and lengthier historical notes interwoven primarily chronologically, but with cross-links at the key points.

It’s advertised as an experiment, rather than say a “draft”. Gripping read for someone already into this subject – not sure if the narrative is intended to capture wider readership ?

OK David, what do you want us to do next ?

Is that “sound” theory tends to destroy the state of affairs it aims to achieve, said Northrop in 1946. Always suspicious of “our time” claims about timeless issues, paricularly post 9/11, post blogging etc, next big thing claims generally, but I guess that was a period where global political organisation was truly in the spotlight.

Reminded of this by the current Guiness Ad on UK TV at the moment – where the young cowboy sets the wild horse free, and (you’ve guessed) a happy ending ensues. Cheesey, but true.

Neil Hannon puts it several ways in a Divine Comedy song I’ve quoted from before, The Certainty Of Chance, this stanza in particular.
You must go and I must set you free,
‘Cos only that only will bring you back to me.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest (not released until Jan 2005) is “Blink : The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking”. Brought to my attention by Marsha at the MoQ Discussion board. About how much thinking & decision making is actually subconscious thought processes, I believe. Can’t argue with that.

I was none too impressed with Gladwell’s Tipping Point; perhaps I over-reacted to disappointment at not finding anything actually new after being much hyped in the blogosphere. The messages are true enough, they were ever thus.

Blogging that is, according to Georganna Hancock at Writer’s Edge. “Can’t think without a keyboard, can’t wait to wireless my thoughts into a computer.” I know what she means. One to watch.

I see she (or her book club) are just starting Yann Martell’s “The Life of Pi”. I found it unputdownable (provided you suspend disbelief).